Bounding the order of a group with a large conjugacy class. (Q2260295)

Following the close connection between irreducible characters and conjugacy classes of groups, this paper presents some results for a group theoretic analog to a character degree parameter. The degree \(d\) of an irreducible character of a finite group \(G\) is always a divisor of \(|G|\) and certainly \(|G|\geq d^2\). In 2008, N. Snyder initially studied the problem of bounding \(|G|\) by means of a parameter \(e\), defined as the non-negative integer satisfying the equation \(|G|=d(d+e)\). This parameter is small when \(G\) has a large irreducible character degree. This gave rise to a series of publications aiming to improve Snyder's bound. In this paper, the problem is transferred to conjugacy classes by taking \(d\) as the square root of a conjugacy class size of \(G\), that is, \(e\) is defined by \(|G|=\sqrt k(\sqrt k+e)\) and it has the similar property that \(e\) is small when \(G\) has a large conjugacy class size. It is proved that \(|G|\leq 2e^2\) and that this bound can be improved for odd order groups in terms of the smallest prime \(p\) dividing the group order, \(|G|\leq (p/(p-1)^2)e^2\). The author also classifies the groups in which the bounds are attained. For an odd prime \(p\), this occurs if and only if either \(G\) is a cyclic group of order \(p\) or \(G\) is a Frobenius group with a cyclic complement of order \(p\). The proofs are elementary.